The As It Happens Files

by Mary Lou Finlay

  When he got to Bosnia, he phoned his wife to tell her he’d arrived safely, and she told him, “You’ve got about three hundred emails here. It’s all over the news. What’s happening?”

  What was happening was that people all over the country who had heard Mike’s story on the radio wanted to know what they could do to help the children in Sheshatshui. Mike told them that if they had any old musical instruments lying around that they didn’t need anymore, they should leave their phone numbers with him and he personally would arrange to come and collect them and he would see that the instruments got to the kids in Sheshatshui. In no time, he had a house full of musical instruments and was planning another trip to Labrador. And this is how ArtsCan Circle was born.

  ArtsCan Circle grew like Topsy. Today it sends musical instruments not only to Sheshatshui but also to other native communities—like Natuashish in Labrador, Pikangikum in northern Ontario and Kugluktuk at the mouth of the Coppermine River in western Nunavut. Instruments and performers, too—people like David Anderson and Bruce McGregor (aka Magoo) and Mike’s musical partner, Raymond McLain. On their first trip to Kugluktuk in January 2006, they took four used guitars, eight new guitars, a saxophone, an assortment of percussion instruments, some accordions and a complete 24-track Mackie hard-drive recording system. Magoo says they played music and taught music and juggling and helped the kids dramatize their stories. They also set up the recording gear and taught teachers and community leaders how to use it, hoping it would serve as a way to record Kugluktuk’s music, stories and history and also share them with people in the south. The temperature, with wind chill, was a brisk minus 47 degrees, but the reception was very warm.

  Naturally, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Sometimes the instruments are destroyed almost as soon as they show up. At one place, Mike was told that all the instruments he’d delivered had been stolen, but then it turned out that some kids had taken them home from school in order to set up their own band, which was just fine with Mike. That’s the kind of thing he was hoping would happen.

  During our conversation in the Glenn Gould Studio in November 2003, Mike took a harmonica out of his pocket and gave us another demonstration of his musical virtuosity. Did I mention that he’s played the Grand Ole Opry over three hundred times? Let me just take a moment to toot his horn, as it were.

  Mike’s performing has earned him a pile of honours, including being named Entertainer of the Year for five consecutive years at the Central Canadian Bluegrass Awards. Country Music News called him “the best harmonica player in country/bluegrass music today.” And if you don’t care for bluegrass, he can give you jazz or rock. So I was curious about exactly what kind of stuff he was playing now for the native kids he was calling on. This is what he told us:

  One tune in particular is called Fox Chase.… It gets the kids’ attention. What I’ll do is, I’ll load myself up with harmonicas and I’ll go out into the bush in the middle of the night in fly-in communities—because I can get the kids at the school but I can’t always get the kids who don’t go to school, and a lot of times they’re in the bush at night—and I play this song.

  So, envision what happens when the kids hear it. Basically, when they hear this tune, they come out laughing at me, and I hand them harmonicas and we start talking. I’ve actually got hugs from these kids who are supposed to be so hard-core.

  I’ll play the tune.

  So he played for us again. This time it was brilliant and very funny. The audience roared their approval, and in my mind I could hear the laughter of hundreds of little kids from Labrador to the western Arctic, and I thought, Aren’t they lucky to have met Mike Stevens? Aren’t we all?

  The last time we spoke, Mike was about to leave for another visit to Sheshatshui, and this time he was taking his son Colin with him. They were going to drive all the way from Brights Grove, Ontario (near Sarnia)—a very long car trip, especially when you consider that the last thousand-mile stretch, from Baie Comeau to Goose Bay, is all gravel.

  “This is something you want to do?” I asked.

  Yes, he did—and so did Colin. Mike’s son had been about seven when the whole Sheshatshui project started. He’d driven around the country with his dad, collecting instruments; he’d sipped tea with the donors and heard their stories; and now Colin was really eager to go to Labrador and share that part of the adventure, too.

  I said I wished we could do another interview on the radio, and Mike said that documentary filmmaker Brian White was going on this trip with him, so he hoped the story would be kept alive.

  I believe it will.

  NINETEEN

  It’s All about Ubuntu

  Spirited radio

  On my very last day at As It Happens, November 30, 2005, my producers and co-host presented me—live on air—with a sort of This Is Your Life package that they had assembled from bits and pieces of my 35 years in broadcasting—TV and radio. There were clips from my earliest television interviews and some memorable As It Happens bits. There were comments and toasts—and a few lies—from former colleagues like Paul Soles and Mark Starowicz. My colleagues had gone so far as to track down the man who’d given me my very first job at the CBC, Rod Holmes. (Thank you, Rod.) They’d even cajoled three former prime ministers to record a goodbye; maybe some of the PMs had wished me gone a long time ago, but they were kind enough not to say so.

  It was hilarious in some spots, touching in others. To tell you the truth, at times it felt a little like an obituary; I kept pinching myself to make sure I was still alive.

  Mike Stevens was there again. And so was Feist.

  It’s funny how Feist came to be on the show. In the weeks leading up to my departure, I was given carte blanche to interview a few of the people I’d always wanted to talk to but hadn’t. So they booked interviews for me with writers David Mitchell and Yann Martel; with Pinchas Zukerman, the violinist and conductor of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa; with comedian and actor Bob Newhart. I even got to flirt a bit with Ted Koppel, who happened to be stepping down from his perch at ABC’s Nightline at around the same time.

  Sometime during that last month, producer Sarah Martin asked me about my favourite music. Sarah, by the way, is a megatalented lady: she speaks English, French and Vietnamese, and she served as our “fixer” in Vietnam when we took the show there in the year 2000. Sarah used her language skills and her charm to cut some very good deals on hotels there, the same way she charmed former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing into appearing on the show—speaking English, too.

  Now Sarah and writer Chris Howden—one of the funniest people I’ve ever met—were sharing the job of organizing and producing my exit. So when Sarah asked me about music, I assumed she was thinking about preparing a few special musical interludes for November 30th. I told her I loved Mozart, Paul Desmond, Gershwin, Piaf and the Beatles. She took some notes and went away.

  The next day Sarah came back with her music list and said sweetly, “Excuse me, but are there any musicians you like who are still, um, alive?”

  Poor Sarah. It came to me then that she was trying to book a Musical Guest for me; she wasn’t going to just spin a disk or two. Ronnie Hawkins would be fun, I thought, but how would we get a whole band into our little crawl space? Yo-Yo Ma was probably tied up. And that’s when I remembered that my son, David, had just given me a CD by a young Canadian singer/songwriter called Feist, and she was awesome. I told Sarah. It’s a credit to both Sarah and the singer that we did get Leslie Feist into our studio to record some talk and music on such short notice.

  As we rolled through my broadcasting career on that November night in 2005, I was hard pressed not to shed a few tears at times. In fact, by the end of the programme, Barbara and I were misty-eyed. Then our handsome young intern Kevin Ball burst into the studio wearing a kilt and playing Bolero on the bagpipes, and we turned to laughing again.

  Kevin was very sweet and he showed great promise as a producer, but I gather he was a bit reluc
tant to barge in on us, to say nothing of playing Bolero. Mark Ulster told me later they’d had to threaten to never let him work there again if he didn’t get into his kilt and perform. Kevin must have wondered at the time if working at As It Happens was worth the cost, but he finally agreed. The result was spectacular in every way.

  But suddenly, I found myself wondering if not working there was what I wanted to do. Was I ready to retire, really?

  At times I still wonder. There are days when I miss it a lot—the stories, the laughter, the daily chase, the wit and good nature and even the bad grammar of the producers, sparring with Barbara, watching everyone’s kids grow up. There were a lot of babies born into the As It Happens family in the last few years; I guess those producers weren’t working all the time, whatever they pretended.

  And there’s the “unfinished business”: the ongoing stories, stories I’d covered for 30 years, some of them, and whose outcomes were still in question. What will happen, I wonder, in the Middle East, in Africa, in China, in the Arctic and the Antarctic, in space? What about Somalia and Zimbabwe, Kosovo and Haiti and Cuba? Will the Americans have a black president? How will Canada fare in the 21st century? Will the Toronto Maple Leafs ever win the Stanley Cup?

  What will happen in Darfur?

  The first mention I find of Darfur in our logs is April 3, 2004. We spoke that day to Jan Egeland, Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs at the U.N., about the ongoing conflict in Sudan. Nothing surprising there: the Sudanese had been going at each other for decades—north against south. But Mr. Egeland was talking now about fighting in an area we weren’t so familiar with, in the west of the country. In Darfur. There was a tragedy unfolding there, he told us, and he hoped the world would become aware of it and maybe do something to keep it from becoming a full-blown disaster.

  In other words, we should try to keep it from becoming another Rwanda. In those days, just ten years after the Rwandan genocide, “never again” was a phrase that cropped up again and again in international congresses: never again a Srebrenica (the Bosnian massacre); never again a Rwanda. Just as, after the Second World War, the world had promised, never again another Holocaust.

  Not long ago, I came across a story told by a survivor of the Rwandan massacre. He said that on the day that the movie Schindler’s List was sweeping the Academy Awards in Hollywood, the massacre of more than half a million Rwandan Tutsis was just two weeks away. In other words, at the very moment that the world was solemnly promising never again to permit another genocide, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were about to be hacked to death in their homes by their neighbours. We did nothing to prevent it.

  But who, apart from Canadian General Roméo Dallaire and a handful of others, knew what was going on in Rwanda? Most of us had no inkling until the killing had reached hideous proportions. That was our excuse in Rwanda. I thought we shouldn’t have that excuse again, so we kept an eye on Darfur. When U.N. people or other NGOs sent someone to investigate, we sought them out. When U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour went in to see what was going on, we interviewed her. We spoke to Canadian Parliamentarians and members of the Arab League. I even broke down and interviewed Mia Farrow about Darfur. I usually avoid movie stars who act like foreign affairs experts, but Mia did a great job of reporting the misery she was witnessing.

  As It Happens wasn’t alone, of course, in trying to draw attention to this poor, beleaguered region, and today everybody knows where Darfur is. And what’s all this attention done for Darfur? You guessed it. Four years of shedding light on Darfur have brought countless truces signed and broken, thousands more rapes and murders, continuing misery for hundreds of thousands of displaced people and growing friction between Sudan and all its neighbours. There are seven thousand peacekeepers there now, many of them under-equipped and ill-trained and all of them undermined by the government in Khartoum and its proxies in Darfur. The U.N. promises seventeen thousand by next year—if Khartoum agrees.

  Barbara Frum wouldn’t be surprised. In 1978, when I was interviewing Frum about her time on As It Happens, I had asked her if there was ever a sense of crusading on her show, if she’d won any victories for her causes:

  Well, my big victory story happened at the very beginning—the best thing that ever happened to me. The first story I ever did was supposed to be an exposé and I was supposed to be a crusader, and the cause that I went after raised a third more money the year after I went after them than they did the year before. It taught me a good lesson about journalism: it’s a very slow drip on a very big rock and if you get a little too pretentious about what you’re doing, you’re dooming yourself to all kinds of disappointment.

  Darfur has been a steady disappointment. Not that the media coverage has garnered support for the Janjaweed, of course, but neither has it put a dent in their murderous activity. And here’s a really scary thought: what if all the media attention has only encouraged the Sudanese rebels to go on fighting a hopeless fight in the mistaken belief that the forces of righteousness—or anyway, NATO and the U.N.—will eventually join the fight on the side of the underdogs, the way they did in Bosnia and Kosovo? What if the media attention has been an obstacle in the way of a ceasefire? I don’t think that’s the case in Darfur, but it’s something to be wary of in the way we cover conflict—another reason to feel humble.

  In any case, it will be up to other people to tell this story now, as well as all the others. History leads me not to expect much progress on any front very soon. But history is also full of pleasant surprises, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, peace in Northern Ireland and the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa.

  It was quite near the beginning of my tenure at As It Happens that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission completed its work and the Commission’s head, Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, agreed to talk to us about his work there. It had been gruelling, he said, hearing about the particular cases of injustice, cruelty and torture that had been inflicted on black South Africans by their white brothers during the apartheid regime. He felt great compassion for them.

  But Tutu said he also felt sorry for the torturers, because they did not emerge unscathed. They were broken men. And it was important to remember that the men who had committed evil acts were not themselves evil, he said; they were capable of redemption. It was this aspect of redemption, Tutu thought, that had persuaded Nelson Mandela to look for a man of the cloth to chair the Truth and Reconciliation hearings.

  Bishop Tutu was a great admirer of President Mandela. He marvelled that the former prisoner could have gone through what he had and come out of it a noble man, not a bitter one. But Tutu went on to say that he thought forgiveness was more in keeping with an African’s nature than seeking revenge:

  Part of the reason why so many come out in this particular kind of way that we have found so astonishing is that in our African worldview, there is a thing called ubuntu. A person is called ubuntu, and ubuntu is the essence of being human. Ubuntu is compassion, ubuntu is hospitality, ubuntu is warmth, ubuntu is sharing, ubuntu is caring.

  And because of our sense that I am because you are, because we say a person is a person through other persons, my humanity is caught up in your humanity. If I want to enhance my humanity, it is by the process of enhancing yours. If I de-humanize you, whether I like it or not, inexorably my humanity is diminished.

  And so, in part, it is a form of self-interest, this thing of not wanting to revenge, because revenge, anger, bitterness—all of these are corrosive of ubuntu, of the harmony that is for the summum bonum, the great good. And so, in a sense, I am not paying back to you, I do not settle scores with you, because the anger is dissipated, and you become a better person, and in that process, I become a better person, too.

  Ubuntu. The essence of being human. This is what it means to be human. When you get right down to it, isn’t that what all our stories are about? All the ones I’ve written about here and all the ones I haven’t,
the ones we’ve shared on As It Happens and the ones yet to be told?

  This is what I will miss most of all: the chance to speak to people like Desmond Tutu and to share the conversation with the rest of the country and the world. The chance to speak to all kinds of people every day, with all kinds of stories.

  But Bishop Tutu would be very familiar with this adage, too: to everything there is a season. I had a wonderful time hosting As It Happens, and now that season is over. It’s a relief to know that the show is in safe hands, with Carol Off and Barbara Budd hosting and a splendid production crew. Happily, I can still be a listener, which I was before and which has always been a rewarding pastime. The conversation will go on, I hope, for many years to come—the conversation, the music, the laughs, the goofs, the scoops and the nuts.

  Happy 40th anniversary, As It Happens! Here’s wishing you 40 more.

  Acknowledgments

  The great fear one has when giving thanks is that at least one important name will be omitted, especially when the debt owed is as large as mine. There are, for instance, the legion of producers, production assistants and technicians whose hard work is reflected in every interview and every story contained in the book, and the interview subjects themselves. Without them, there is no show, nor any book. I’ve put the producers’ credits elsewhere with the list of interviews they produced and which I excerpted for the book. Special thanks are due to: Howard Bernstein, who lured me to radio in 1988, Jeffrey Dworkin, who first planted the idea of hosting As It Happens in my mind, Alex Frame, who gave me the job, Linda Groen, who guided me through the first years, and Barbara Budd, who made it fun. I am very grateful to George Jamieson and Mark Ulster for reading the manuscript in its early stages and bringing it more in line with the way things really happened and to John Perry for his help tracking down elusive subjects. Thanks also to Barbara Brown for putting the CBC’s resources behind me, and to Ken Puley and Brent Michaluk for giving me room in the radio archives and retrieving all the tapes I wanted to listen to again.